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Your payroll pension tasks

Every time you pay your workers there are some pension tasks you need to complete. We’ve made it easy for you to see what the tasks are and how long they might take you.

What to expect each pay period

We’ve spoken to businesses to find out how much time they spend on their Nest tasks every month. The majority of those with fewer than 50 workers say it takes under 30 minutes. Those with over 50 workers say they can spend up to two hours.

It will depend on the size of your business, how often you run payroll and on the type of software you use.

Did you know?

You can use postponement to delay the date you need to automatically enrol your workers. The period can be for up to three months.

Here's a breakdown of your pay period tasks.

Assess workers

Every pay period you must assess your workers to see if they should be enrolled into Nest. This involves checking their earnings and age. You need to do this for:

new workers
workers who previously weren’t eligible, to see if they now qualify. Workers who aren’t eligible can ask to join Nest. If they do ask, you must check if you need to contribute too

Lots of businesses use payroll software that can assess which workers are eligible.

We make it easy for you to understand who needs to be enrolled.

Send communications

There’s some specific information you must give your workers about their pension. Our communication toolkit makes things simple – it tells you exactly what to send and has templates you can download and use.

Enrol workers

Once you know which workers to enrol, you can take the next step. This includes telling us some information about each worker. You need to enrol your workers within six weeks of when they became eligible.

Find out more about how to enrol workers.

Record and pay contributions

You tell us the contributions you’re making for every worker using a contribution schedule, or by entering the information online. You then pay the contributions to us.

Workers with no contributions

Workers you’ve already enrolled into Nest might not earn enough to make a contribution every pay period. This can happen when a worker has variable pay and you use their qualifying earnings to calculate contributions.

Many payroll software packages will automatically work out if an employee earns enough to contribute. If they don’t earn enough or earn nothing in a pay period, you need to use a contribution schedule to tell us that the worker won’t be contributing.

Getting help

On top of these regular payroll tasks, there are one-off and ongoing duties for you to complete too.

If you think you’ll need help with any of your duties, that’s fine. Lots of employers ask third-party administrators (TPA), like bookkeepers or payroll administrators to support them with some, or all of their auto enrolment tasks.

See how straightforward we’ve made it to get help with your tasks.